5.4 and 6.1 - this kind of triking is lots of fun!

OMG I am so sorry for that awful title. I really have drifted into the horrible world of really bad rhyming couplets, haven't I?

Anyway, the first trip saw me heading out on my own and, essentially, following the same route we did last time. The day was hot, dry and with very little wind. I was glad I wore my shorts in the +30C weather.

My venture also had me taking note of the number of people who seemed to have replaced their sun scorched drought stricken brown lawns with much lusher and much newer sod. I'm never sure why people do that kind of thing since brown grass isn't dead but just dormant. Once it rains again the grass will soften once more and become the vibrant emerald green we are so used to seeing...and expecting. However, thanks to the spectre of climate change, what would ordinarily be a summer of sunshine and rainy periods has, instead, just been a summer of desiccating, parched landscapes reminiscent of places like Arizona and not Canada's capital city.

The second trip I took, a couple of days later, had me following the streets and intercepting the bike paths towards the Greenboro branch of the Ottawa Public Library. As with my earlier trip, the day was hot, sunny, dry and with no wind to speak of. I set out, not having any particular goal in mind but to exceed the 5.4 kilometre trips I had been taking. The pathways encircling the library are very well travelled by cyclist, jogger and stroller alike but what really got my attention was the condition the pathways were in.

If you think that it's fun cycling along pathways that are not much more than a collection of frost heaves, potholes and cracks the size of the San Andreas fault lines then you would be mistaken. I found myself weaving around the worst of the potholes, cracks and other nasties as though I were a downhill skier. It got to the point, though, where my eyeballs just couldn't handle the relentless bumping and bouncing around so I switched to the side streets around the library - at least just until my eyeballs could stop bouncing around and my vision was restored to something useful.

No matter, though, I had a lot of fun and my ever trusty catrike survived the whole thing...my eyes, however, took a little longer.

Tally for both trips was 11.5 kilometres done. That leaves me 145.7 to go as of today.